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Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
NonfictionPhotographyLifestylesAnimals

Faithful Unto Death

Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
Faithful Unto Death is a thoughtful investigation into the bonds of pets and their owners that chronicles the ways in which we grieve and remember the animals we love.
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Best friends in the White House

There have been earlier accounts of Eleanor Roosevelt’s long friendship with and romantic attachment to former Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok. But in Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, author Susan Quinn draws on the more than 3,300 letters the two women wrote each other, delving deeper into their intimacy.
NonfictionBiography

A luminous portrait of a literary life

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When Shirley Jackson's now-classic story "The Lottery" appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, readers wrote in to the magazine decrying the story as "outrageous," "shocking," "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." In spite of such responses, within a year the story was included in Prize Stories of 1949 and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, acknowledging the power of Jackson's storytelling craft and introducing very widely a writer whose first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), had disappointing sales but cannily and hauntingly depicted the humorous, horrific and sometimes macabre irony of suburban life.

Ruth Franklin's elegant Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life now provides what has long been missing: a sensitive, incisive, thoroughly detailed reading of Jackson's stories and novels as they issue from the writer’s never-very-happy life. In an almost year-by-year examination, Franklin draws on letters, journals and Jackson's writings to narrate the days of a young woman whose own conventional mother was disappointed, and even horrified, that her daughter was not very conventional: "Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead."

Franklin nimbly guides us through Jackson's childhood in California, where she was always writing, and her family's move to Rochester, New York, in her senior year of high school. While attending Syracuse University, she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and published her first story, "Janice," in the school's literary magazine. The book also chronicles her difficult, tumultuous marriage to Hyman, a professor and prominent literary critic, and her devotion to her four children.

Franklin provides sparkling readings of Jackson's writing, including the challenges she faced with each novel or story, ranging from her less well-known novel, Hangsaman, to her more familiar tales of urban chill, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as autobiographical collections such as Life Among the Savages. All of her writings dwell on the tension of inhabiting the roles of housewife and mother and bestselling author.

This luminous critical biography reveals a writer who thought her task—much like Hawthorne and Poe—was to pull back the curtain on the darkness of the human heart. Franklin smartly succeeds in drawing so colorful a portrait of the author that we’re encouraged to pick up one of her stories or novels and read Jackson all over again.

When Shirley Jackson's now-classic story "The Lottery" appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, readers wrote in to the magazine decrying the story as "outrageous," "shocking," "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." In spite of such responses, within a year the story was included in Prize Stories of 1949 and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, acknowledging the power of Jackson's storytelling craft and introducing very widely a writer whose first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), had disappointing sales but cannily and hauntingly depicted the humorous, horrific and sometimes macabre irony of suburban life.

Sisters to the end

In Marrow: A Love Story, she chronicles a deeply personal crisis: Her younger sister Maggie’s lymphoma had returned after seven years of remission, and she needed a bone marrow transplant. Lesser turned out to be a perfect match.
Nonfiction

The countdown to a successful book

Review by Kelly Blewett

In The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers make a provocative claim: A book’s fate in the marketplace can be determined in advance, and not by the opinions of smart literary critics, book publishers or savvy writers. Instead, they argue that bestseller status can be predicted, with more than 80 percent accuracy, by a computer.

To an avid reader, attuned to the seeming incongruity and unpredictability of the weekly New York Times bestseller list, such a claim may seem akin to heresy. But the book’s co-authors, armed with a secret algorithm, unpack precisely how a book like Fifty Shades of Grey can reasonably, accurately and persuasively be compared to something else entirely, like, say, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch.

There’s an argument here about mass reading that is undeniably pleasing: The highbrow and the lowbrow are not, in fact, so far apart as most would believe. The book proceeds with more seemingly impossible facts, such as this: Algorithms can predict, with surprising levels of accuracy, whether a book was written by a male or female author only by looking at the writer’s use of pronouns. Seemingly insignificant details add up. And computers excel at this kind of granular counting.

Using a corpus of just over 5,000 books (500 of which are NYT bestsellers), the researchers have trained the computer to track more than 20,000 discrete characteristics. These items reveal patterns about all sorts of things—from topic to plot, from character to style. And along the way, the researchers unpack how various titles and authors you already know—from Danielle Steele to John Grisham—exemplify the patterns they are tracing, even as they move toward solving a particular and engrossing mystery: what working writer today best exemplifies popular approaches to novel writing. For readers interested in books about books, this is a title not to be missed.

In The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers make a provocative claim: A book’s fate in the marketplace can be determined in advance, and not by the opinions of smart literary critics, book publishers or savvy writers.

A superstar chef’s second act

In The French Chef in America, Julia Child’s great-nephew, journalist Alex Prud’homme, treats Child’s “second act” like a carefully crafted menu. He pays exquisite attention to the details without ever losing sight of the overall experience.
NonfictionHistory

Forsyth County reckons with its ugly history

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Even given the many racially tainted chapters in U.S. history, the story of Georgia’s Forsyth County still shocks. Patrick Phillips grew up “living inside the bubble of Georgia’s notorious ‘white county’ ” where there were few blacks—and, once, there had been none. Something happened in 1912, and after that, Forsyth County was all-white and proud of it. Its citizens would go to horrific lengths for another 75 years to keep it that way. Phillips, grown and living far away, found himself “ashamed to recall how I defended my silence.” Blood at the Root is the result, an account as riveting in its historical detail as it is troubling in its foreshadowing of racial tensions today.

In 1912, after the rape and murder of young, white Mae Crow and the so-called confession by black teenager Ernest Knox, white “night riders” took matters into their own hands. After one of the three suspects was beaten, lynched and shot by a vengeful mob, blacks fled as their homes and families became targets for shooters and arsonists. Their property, crops and livestock soon fell into eager white hands. In the days and years that followed, long after the teenagers had been convicted and hanged, any black person entering the county was promptly terrorized into leaving.

Attempts at racial cleansing began long before the Jim Crow era, from the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 through the systemic failures of Reconstruction. In Forsyth County, barring blacks altogether was the answer to any “race troubles.” This injustice would persist well beyond the reach of civil rights for decades, an ugly history kept silent—until now.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Even given the many racially tainted chapters in U.S. history, the story of Georgia’s Forsyth County still shocks. Patrick Phillips grew up “living inside the bubble of Georgia’s notorious ‘white county’ ” where there were few blacks—and, once, there had been none. Something happened in 1912, and after that, Forsyth County was all-white and proud of it. Its citizens would go to horrific lengths for another 75 years to keep it that way. Phillips, grown and living far away, found himself “ashamed to recall how I defended my silence.” Blood at the Root is the result, an account as riveting in its historical detail as it is troubling in its foreshadowing of racial tensions today.
Nonfiction

Carving a path outside of convention

Review by Heather Seggel

Darling Days opens with a brief letter from iO Tillett Wright to his mother, offering forgiveness and love. It’s well-placed in the story, because reading about Wright’s childhood, and the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of both parents, can leave a reader feeling angry and vengeful. Wright’s story is often grim, but it points toward reconciliation and a measure of peace beyond the turmoil.

A genderqueer photographer, writer, MTV host and activist, Wright had an unorthodox upbringing. His mother, Rhonna, was a “glamazon,” who exercised obsessively and was always in motion, often with the aid of pharmaceuticals. Moving between apartments in the projects, she and Wright’s father split up not long after his birth, and neither was well-equipped to raise a child. Frequently going hungry and struggling in school, Wright couldn’t even catch a break on the playground. When some kids refused to let Wright join a football game as a girl, he resolved on the spot to live as a boy named Ricky and did so for the next decade.

When his mother’s inexplicable rages became unbearable, Wright summoned the courage to ask for help. Moving from the streets of New York’s roughest neighborhoods to Europe with his dad and finding stability in an English boarding school, he learned that his father, too, was fighting demons that prevented him from being a suitable guardian.

Darling Days is a story of unfortunate self-reliance, but Wright tells it vividly. The thrills and temptations of the art world, and the people that busy whirl leaves behind, are also convincingly captured here.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Darling Days opens with a brief letter from iO Tillett Wright to his mother, offering forgiveness and love. It’s well-placed in the story, because reading about Wright’s childhood, and the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of both parents, can leave a reader feeling angry and vengeful. Wright’s story is often grim, but it points toward reconciliation and a measure of peace beyond the turmoil.

Closing the digital deal

Tracy Kidder has guided a legion of readers along many a wondrous journey, and they’ll be eager to join his latest trip in A Truck Full of Money, a portrait of entrepreneur Paul English, who in 2012 sold Kayak—the online travel company he cofounded—to Priceline for $1.8 billion.
NonfictionMemoir

A marriage’s dark demise inside a cursed castle

Review by Catherine Hollis

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying. Author of the bestselling novels Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as an award-winning memoir about her Vietnam-vet father, Trussoni turns her unique gaze in The Fortress to the dark heart of romance. Only she could write a memoir about a failed marriage that also includes black magic, Communist Bulgaria, the Knights Templar, ghosts and Provence. 

When Trussoni meets Nikolai at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the passion is intense, immediate and transformative. Soon the smoldering Bulgarian on a limited student visa is living in her apartment, eating her food and telling her that they have spent lifetimes looking for each other. He must be with her—which is why she ends up moving to Bulgaria with him when his visa expires. That, and the fact that she’s pregnant. Ignoring the persistent red flags in Nikolai’s behavior, she finds herself living in Eastern Europe for two years and giving birth in a stark Communist-era hospital. 

The relationship is good until it isn’t, but a major contributing factor is Nikolai’s volatile mental state. After selling her first novel, Trussoni moves the family to the South of France into a 13th-century fortress used by the Knights Templar. Her depiction of the psychological terrors of Nikolai’s unraveling mind set against the occult history of their remote castle is reminiscent of The Shining, down to the ghostly apparitions and nightmares they each suffer. By the time Trussoni discovers the Tibetan death threats Nikolai has carved into a doorframe, her fear is palpable and the suspense unrelenting. 

While The Fortress reads like a horror novel, its raw power comes from the hard-won emotional clarity Trussoni brings to her own role in the creation and dissolution of this marriage from hell.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying.

Play it again, Van

Looking for some appropriate piano accompaniment to that multi-part documentary on the Cold War you’re planning? It’s an easy call—just check out the musical archives of Van Cliburn, who became synonymous with the saber-rattling U.S.-Soviet Union standoff when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.
NonfictionMemoir

Jennifer Weiner tells all

Review by Amy Scribner

I consider myself a bit of a Jennifer Weiner connoisseur. I’ve read all her books and short stories, watched her short-lived TV series “State of Georgia” and laughed at her live-tweeting during “The Bachelor.”

Yet even I—a borderline creepy Jen Weiner fan—was surprised by many of the personal details she divulges in her beautifully heartfelt new memoir. Hungry Heart is about all the phases of Weiner’s life: an awkward Jewish teenager in suburban New Jersey, a Princeton student, a bestselling writer, a twice-married mom of two girls.

“You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again” is the book’s refrain. And while she seemingly lives a charmed life, Weiner has had her share of falls. She writes poignantly about her father, a successful doctor, who was doting when she was young but then left the family and died a drug addict. It was only after his death that Weiner and her siblings learned that he had fathered another child. She shares the searing details of a miscarriage after an unplanned pregnancy in her 40s. In another chapter called “Carry That Weight,” Weiner writes about her nearly lifelong struggle with body acceptance. 

“You deprive yourself until you’re weak, faint with hunger, embarrassing yourself by drooling every time an Applebee’s commercial comes on,” she writes. “Then you cram whatever’s handy down your trough, and you don’t even taste it, and you eat more of it than you’d intended, and you hate yourself even more. Rinse, repeat.”

Ultimately, though, Weiner has found peace with her body—and her life. Her honesty, charm and buoyant spirit come through on every page of this hilarious, wise, putting-it-all-out-there book.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I consider myself a bit of a Jennifer Weiner connoisseur. I’ve read all her books and short stories, watched her short-lived TV series “State of Georgia” and laughed at her live-tweeting during “The Bachelor.”

An opera star’s rise against the odds

You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.

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